Towards Practical Cloud Offloading for Low-cost Ground Vehicle Workloads

Low-cost Ground Vehicles (LGVs) have been widely adopted to conduct various tasks in our daily life. However, the limited on-board battery capacity and computation resources prevent LGVs from taking more complex and intelligent workloads. A promising approach is to offload the computation from local LGVs to remote servers. However, current cloud-robotic research and platforms are still at a very early stage. Compared to other systems and devices, optimizing LGV workload offloading faces more challenges, such as the uncertainty of environments and the mobility feature of devices.In this paper, we explore the opportunities of optimizing cloud offloading of LGV workloads from the perspectives of performance, energy efficiency and network robustness. We first build an analytical model to reveal the computation role and impact of each function in LGV workloads. Then we propose several optimization strategies (fine-grained migration, cloud acceleration, real-time monitoring and adjustment) to accelerate workload computation, reduce on-board energy consumption, and increase the network robustness. We implement an end-to-end cloud-robotic framework with such strategies to achieve dynamic and adaptive offloading. Evaluations on physical LGVs show that our strategies can significantly reduce the total energy consumption by 2.12× and mission completion time by 2.53×, and maintain strong robust ness under poor network quality.